Authors

Discussion

This paper takes as its starting point a grant charter (zhalovannaia gramota) issued by Oleg Ivanovich, grand prince of Riazanʹ (1351–71, 1372–1402), to the Olʹgov monastery, located just outside the city on the banks of the Oka. Dating to around 1371, the document is important for two reasons: first, as one of the few such charters from before 1400 surviving in its original, rather than in a later copy; and second, as the only edict of its kind to be illuminated, with a deesis depicting the monastery’s hegumen in prayer to Christ, accompanied by several other intercessory figures.

Interweaving institutional and aesthetic analysis of this object, I explore how it might be used to craft something approaching a global microhistory of Riazanʹ. The principality’s geography by the fourteenth century – increasingly squeezed between Moscow and the khans of the Jochid ulus (‘Golden Horde’) – presents an archetypal example of liminal politics. In that vein, against perceptions of late medieval Rus that sublimate alternative princely ambitions into a narrative of inevitable Muscovite encroachment, Riazanʹ offers a crucial corrective. Its rulers, I suggest, incorporated political and stylistic modes from far beyond their immediate context, looking instead to both Byzantine and Mongol practice to express their power.